Obamacare work in progress for Appalachian residents in Floyd County, KY

Four months after the Affordable Care Act took effect, a team of journalists from USA Today and The Courier-Journal has found that in Floyd County, Obamacare is a neither a train wreck nor a cure-all. It's a work in progress; widely misrepresented and misunderstood, it's helped some people and hurt others, while a handful seem unaffected.

At least 40 U.S. veterans died waiting for appointments at the Phoenix Veterans Affairs Health Care system, many of whom were placed on a secret waiting list.

The secret list was part of an elaborate scheme designed by Veterans Affairs managers in Phoenix who were trying to hide that 1,400 to 1,600 sick veterans were forced to wait months to see a doctor, according to a recently retired top VA doctor and several high-level sources.

For six months, CNN has been reporting on extended delays in health care appointments suffered by veterans across the country and who died while waiting for appointments and care. But the new revelations about the Phoenix VA are perhaps the most disturbing and striking to come to light thus far.

Read the story here.

California's $840-million medical prison — the largest in the nation — was built to provide care to more than 1,800 inmates.

When fully operational, it was supposed to help the state's prison system emerge from a decade of federal oversight brought on by the persistent neglect and poor medical treatment of inmates.

But since opening in July, the state-of-the-art California Health Care Facility has been beset by waste, mismanagement and miscommunication between the prison and medical staffs.

In the decade after 9/11, the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs paid $200 million to nearly 1,000 families in wrongful death cases, according to VA data obtained by The Center for Investigative Reporting.

In that time, CIR found the agency made wrongful death payments to nearly 1,000 grieving families, ranging from decorated Iraq War veterans who shot or hanged themselves after being turned away from mental health treatment, to Vietnam veterans whose cancerous tumors were identified but allowed to grow, to missed diagnoses, botched surgeries and fatal neglect of elderly veterans.

Read the story and view the interactive map.

In the land of the poorest poor, less than half of Mississippi’s primary care physicians are willing to see new Medicaid patients.

This contrasts with the nation as a whole, where more than two-thirds of doctors open their doors to new Medicaid patients.

Veterans centers in Oklahoma routinely hire doctors and other licensed medical personnel with a record of problems to treat the state’s sickest, most vulnerable veterans.

Officials with the Oklahoma Department of Veterans Affairs say money is the culprit, claiming it’s difficult to find suitable applicants with clean records to work at the state’s seven veterans centers.

A review of data from the nation's 306 healthcare markets, as well as interviews with scores of experts and visits to communities from Maine to Hawaii, points to many common features of America's healthiest places.

More people have health insurance. Doctors and hospitals cooperate more closely, ensuring patients get preventive care and don't fall through the cracks. Civic and business leaders help drive community efforts to expand access to healthcare, measure results and improve quality.

Trauma patients, who have no choice in where the ambulance takes them, are being charged as much as $33,000 the moment they enter a Florida trauma center. That money doesn’t account for X-rays or treatment; it’s just a cover charge, and thousands of patients have been billed more for it than for their actual medical care. The Tampa Bay Times, in an unprecedented data analysis, found that this fee, pushed a decade ago by industry lobbyists, has spiraled out of control. Taking it to unprecedented heights: One of the nation’s largest for-profit hospital chains, Hospital Corporation of America.

Reports of scheduled ER visits raised a concern internally that some cardiologists might be using the emergency department to get the costs of uninsured patients’ procedures covered, according to hospital correspondence. In some cases, the government’s Medicaid program and private insurers will pay for procedures done via an emergency-room visit that wouldn’t be covered otherwise, Bloomberg News reports.

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Arizona’s screening now tests for 29 diseases or conditions, including hearing loss. That number places Arizona in the bottom third of states.

As of 2011, at least 15 states tested for more than 50 conditions, according to the Save Babies Through Screening Foundation, a national non-profit that advocates for newborn screening.